SilverBills: A Financial and Legal Tech Tool for Caregivers

Financial and legal management for persons with dementia (PwD) is a crucial responsibility of caregivers. This responsibility adds to the stress and strain of caregiving. Current technology tools that help with bill management and budgeting often require a high degree of technical expertise and provide an insufficient degree of personal support to address the caregivers' needs. Current approaches to financial management are typically aimed at technologically savvy millennials rather than caregivers. Additionally, these approaches do not address the need for safe and accessible storage of legal documents. Thus, the current solutions available for these tasks are a mismatch for caregivers. The investigators will address the lack of effective financial management and legal support for caregivers of PwD. Using proprietary technology, SilverBills receives, scrutinizes, stores, and pays bills on behalf of clients. The goal of this project is to decrease the stress and strain on caregivers of PwD, by providing a simple, safe, and effective financial and legal management tool. The investigators aim to build an easy to use, customizable, client facing application for caregivers to direct the financial activities of PwD. In addition, The investigators will enhance the capabilities of the application to reconcile banking information, detect fraud, secure data, provide enhanced reporting capabilities and provide further budgeting and planning functionality. Finally, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Denver, The investigators will assess caregiver burden and physical, financial, and emotional distress. The team supporting Silverbills V2 includes expertise in elder law, business development, Ruby on Rails software engineering, financial security and cognitive health, caregiving, research design and statistics. The work proposed should demonstrate that the SilverBills V2 product will: 1) Provide a financial management tool which includes a messaging system and vault of critical documents for caregivers of PwD and/or older adults, and 2) Evaluate the effectiveness of our product to decrease caregiver stress and increase caregiver quality of life. This team will support the rigorous scientific validation which will potentially provide evidence of our innovation and support this critical work to provide technological tools for financial and legal management to caregivers of PwD.